Starbucks Jams: SFV Acid

March 2014

A while ago we featured a short film by British director and photographer Tyrone Lebon on producer SFV Acid; a brilliant snapshot of the artist’s daily life and musings around the San Fernando Valley area of Southern California. The mini doc champions SFV’s music and drawings, his love for daily weirdness, and his alliance with “Starbucks humans”, a “race” finding comfort and pockets of solitary productivity within one of the multinational chain’s many outlets. Clearly a fan of the surreal, his website is also worth a visit; a “Technical Support Network” and “Tech News” site with an essay on technology’s influence on music.

As a man of his word and people, the producer’s 2013 album The Dwell, (released on UNO) was aptly recorded entirely in a local Starbucks, and keeps his hometown central to the work’s theme. Though a little belated, a recent video emerged for the album’s acid house tinted track “Dwell Master Infinite”, set in “the horror of a mild afternoon in the San Fernando Valley” and

“In the film a misshapen protagonist ambulates a vast landscape of public parks and empty streets before combusting in a suburban backyard. Spurned by passersby and disquietingly ill at ease amidst the pleasantness, his true dwelling is in the womb of the chain cafe.”